Jonathon, please edit this back to its normal size !
Don't be so typographically innovative !

Welp, there goes my #1. My comments are short but simple.

"For me, Graceland is probably as close as anyone is going to get to a perfect album. I own about a dozen different copies. I can't exactly remember when it hit me, but I know that my musical tastes changed forever one day when I just sat down and listened to this album. It opened up an entirely new world for me."

That leaves 3 of my top 10 to show up, another 3 from my top 10 I know are gonna show up, and 4 left out in the cold. And if I'm predicting the rest correctly, I have at least 12 more out of my top 11-50 to show up.

I don't know how!!!! I spent like 5 minutes trying to fix it!


There...apparently it was so large due to the quoting, and that the album titles are in 6 font. I fixed it though. sorry!

jonathon, read this keeping in mind i put YHF at my #14. I don't think it's either innovative, or avant-garde but it is incredibly creative, and i think there is an important distinction. 'Innovative' means something totally new and plenty of bands before wilco have put experiments on top of conventional song structure (starting all the way back with Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground).

The drunken piano and interesting rhythms of "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" i think can be linked to influence from tom waits, and many of the other noises present in the album is just some electronica influence put on top of their original, more conventional song structure. the creativity comes from combining these pre-existing influences and making them sound organic and beautiful.

the one song that takes exception i think, is "Radio Cure." While many experimental artists like to create songs that sound like they're imploding on themselves, wilco takes it a step further, making a song that sounds already imploded on itself, still struggling to survive. and i think the ending of that song is so beautiful.

still, my favorite song off that album (if there can really be ONE) is probably "War on War." It gets me every time....of course i'm listening to Jesus etc. now and i don't know....hmm maybe I Am Trying to break your heart?

thanx Jonoathon !!

Please avoid quoting the "big" posts because the parameters are changed and that will mess up your posts !

I guess I'm gonna stop posting now. Back tomorrow with hopefully the '50s and maybe more !

I think Wilco is a complete band. On record they always pay a lot of attention to production and sound, giving each of their albums a distinctive mood. Indie and "avant garde" fans will tend to prefer YHF or maybe Ghost is Born, old classic rock and singer-songwriter fans (like yours truly) will love Being There or Sky Blue Sky (my fave Wilco album and my all time # 57). But to a lot of Wilco fans, Sky Blue Sky is not dark enough, and the Steely Danesque guitar and keyboards are too mid seventies for them.
As for the new one, I just bought it and will listen to it tomorrow !
And when they play live, they're really rocking !
I love those bands which bring back classic and alternative rock back together.

Only one of my top 10 albums have shown up, and that was just outside the top 200. I expect one of the rest to come, and I would be really (pleasantly) surprised if one of the 8 others would show up.

Fair enough Michael. I guess my problem is people consider Kid A innovative when artists like Autechre and Aphex Twin were doing that sort of thing a decade before.

I think the strength of the 00s hasn't been innovation, but rather the breaking down of sonic and musical barriers. I mean think about it; 20 years ago if a band used samples it would shoot their credibility. Now it's almost the rule, not the exception.

The way this last stretch from 70 to 58 has left me cold, I'm beginning to wonder if my best chance to crack the top 100 will miss altogether.

i wholeheartedly agree.

I came to a point (or wasn't I always like that ?) when innovation doesn't matter much to me. What's important is expression, whatever the style, the production, the level of innovation, etc..
All I want is to be moved by an album, not intellectually interested. That was the meaning of my list.

I agree Nicolas. Innovation just for the sake of being innovative means nothing to me. I do love a lot of records that are considered to be the most innovative albums of all-time, but the reason they are considered as such is because they were able to be innovative but also accessible to a wide enough audience to be influential.

Innovative isn't the right word for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Uncommercial is probably better, considering the story behind the album. It's kind of between being alternative and being indie. It's far from the sort of radio oriented trendy music that moves copies, but it's also catchy and poppy and far from the sort of noisy, grindy lo-fi stuff that made up underground music until then.

The impact of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot isn't that it was musically new, so much that it made a lot of other bands more courageous with the sort of music they were willing to write and try to sell.

Yay: Lots of albums in my top 100 have shown up recently -- If You're Feeling Sinister (#37), Different Class (#49), Surfer Rosa (#41), Blue (#23). Dummy was on my draft list, but since I only went to #100 here it didn't quite make the cut.

Innovation is overrated. I agree with those who are on the side of great songwriting, wit, passion, complexity, honest of expression. Honestly, virtually everything that can be done in pop music has been done either in pop or in other forms of music. There is very little room for anything "new".

The fact that "virtually everything that can be done in pop music has been done either in pop or in other forms of music" is exactly why true innovation is so valuable and worthy of acclaim.

What song hasn't already been written in some fashion already?

I'm not criticising here, but I find the notion that 'there is very little room for anything "new"' a bit depressing.
Reading Bill and Chris' comments from the top of the page about feeling despair about the state of contempory music, I kinda' felt the sentiments were relatable, but at the same time I've always believed that there is always great music being made. Just don't necessarily expect to find it within a country mile of the mainstream. And certainly not on MTV.

I completely agree that music doesn't have an obligation to be innovative in order to blow you away. But I also believe that it's human nature to mass produce bullshit, and to simultaneously throw up the occasional anomaly.
I caught a few minutes of the MTV awards the other night and had some perfectly natural carpet bombing fantasies. Becoming jaded is the most natural thing in the world, but music is one of the few things that can transcend that, regardless of how risible mainstream radio and music television become.

Just curious: is one of these lists being done on the forums for the best albums of the 00s?

i believe in 2011 is what we (to my dismay) agreed upon.

Note: the following is a long post on this subject. It kind of wanders from the topic a little into what I think makes a great record, and it probably should be in a new thread. That said, enjoy:

I would have to say I'm in this school of thought as well. Very little of anything is new in music. There are only 12 notes on a scale, and just about all the harmonic/melodic ideas are played out. It's very hard to create something new in that way; for example, I used to subscribe to Bass Player magazine and they would interview these jazz virtuosos who would spend years expanding on one harmonic idea and composing pieces to that end. There really hasn't been much done to that end since Miles Davis, Coltrane and Monk. Most of the innovation these days has switched to the instrumental aspect, with electric guitars and computers and whatnot. But even then you have to be the first person to plug this instrument into this effect through that speaker to get the new sound. There's just not that much room to go further.

But the genius of great musicians lies in the ability to recycle what has already been done in a new way, to take all the records they love in and spit them out in a new from with bits and pieces from here and there, in a way that's expressive of the emotional state of the artist. The other day I was watching "VH1 Classic albums" and they were doing The Doors, and it was amazing because almost everything they did was taken from somewhere else, and yet it sounds completely different from anything else. I mean, literally, the drummer played a samba beat, the organist was playing a Ray Charles bassline, the guitarist stole the riff off another band changing about 3 notes, but it made a new song. That, combined with the crazy world of Jim Morrison, made a great song (the song in question is "Break On Through (to the Other Side)," if you want to try to pick out the pieces). There's no question his fragile emotional state drove the band's songwriting abilities, because he would just spit out a melody about funeral pyres and the band would be like "Quick! Let's make a song!" Almost all great bands are like that; I'm sure if you look at your favorite artists, their back story looks like: Tortured emotional state + great record collection = amazing band.

With those qualities an artist can make a record that is both original and heartfelt. Usually it will be both; sometimes a record doesn't do anything particularly new but the clarity of the artist's voice shines through; other times a record will be more of a thought experiment in "how far can I push the limit"; but the very best records can do both. And so both elements of the formula are important. If you're not in a weird place emotionally, but you listen to great artists, you turn into the Killers (good songs but you know they couldn't up with anything that didn't copy their heroes); flip it around and you become Linkin Park (tortured souls that can't express it in any way without radio-friendly choruses and too much distortion). You can't have one without the other.

Of course, these sorts of things play into the myth of rock a lot. There wouldn't be Nirvana if Kurt Cobain's parents didn't get divorced and he didn't get high on heroin all the time. And of course there would be no LCD Soundsystem if James Murphy didn't spend his time DJing parties with Can and Daft Punk, etc, etc. (The flip side is true too: no personal trauma = no "Someone Great" and no Pixies = no "Smells Like Teen Spirit"). In both cases the artist plays around with instruments figuring out someone else's sound, perhaps experimenting a little bit, writes a song reflecting their emotional state, and performs it in a style that is a combination of their heroes', with a bit of experiment thrown in. The diverseness of the record collection often leads to the "newness" of the sound. Kurt's Sonic Youth-meets-Beatles tastes were a pop refinement of indie records, a common trajectory, while Mr. LCD's all over the place taste made for contrasts in sound many of us didn't see coming.

Some people I bet are thinking: I know a great band that isn't original at all, with no emotional traumas, and they're still great. I do too, and they're one of my favorites: Led Zeppelin. They stole everything, and changed very little of it. And most of their members were living comfortable rock n' roll lifestyles, by their second album. How did they do it?

The answer is twofold. First, well, the formula isn't surefire. Sometimes we just like music because we like it. Accidents happen. "Creep" should be terrible - how many post-grunge bands were there in 1993? - and Thom Yorke hadn't really developed as a songwriter yet - and because of those clunks before the chorus, we got to hear about what would become the best rock band in the world.

But careers aren't accidents, and Led Zeppelin had a long one. Their main weapon: experience. They weren't angsty teenagers anymore, and instead of drawing on heartwrenching relationships they drew on a decade in the music biz. Page and Jones had enough session work in that they knew how to take an idea, play it in their style, refine it, and turn it into a hit. They also loved the blues, so they drew their ideas from the records they loved. They didn't need their own voice; they'd already developed it years ago. Eventually they got so good at this (and tired of stealing from just the blues) they could play reggae, Middle Eastern music, funk, anything and still be Led Zeppelin. They played for a long, long time and when they got bored they found new bits to recycle into their sound. They became a "hit factory" in this sense; they developed a formula, and the way they formula didn't get old was that it was changed every time a little bit. That's Motown was run, that's how R.E.M. spent the '80s.

And all of these factors are part of the greatest records of all time. Are they new, or innovative? Yes and no. There are certainly elements that have been done before, and there may be "new" sounds that arise from experimentation. In either case, the artist took these sounds, and made them into a song that meant something to them, and that probably emotionally affects the listener too. Over time, some artists get really good at this, and that's why they're so great; for others the unfiltered strength of the artist's voice is more of a factor, but most of the time for this to get through they have to be playing with new sounds or recombining old ones in a way that hasn't been done before. If you look at the Beatles, if you look at Pet Sounds, if you look at "Like a Rolling Stone" all these things happened. The sounds aren't new, the instruments aren't new, the chords and melodies aren't really new, but they've been taken, mishmashed, fed out the brain of a torured genius, who has done this many times before, but not as successfully, and created something beautiful. New? Not hardly. But is it innovative? Yes.

Take some time to parse all that.

OK, first of all settle down. Secondly, I DIDN'T EVEN SAY THIS. I entered no comments for YHF, but someone else obviously did and I've been given credit for what they said. Can you please correct this, Nicolas.